Google Event Recap – Leadership & Coaching

My trip to Google was great! It’s always inspiring to visit a Google office. I’m blown away that this company was started by two guys going to Stanford just twenty short years ago. Emarketed and Google are the same age! But in case you didn’t know, we’re much smaller. 😉

Due to the nature of the content and method the trainer used to coach us, it was tough to capture it live on social media. So here’s a recap:

Interestingly enough the event didn’t promote Google at all. Besides the free swag and being in the cool space in Santa Monica, I was not pitched on Google. At previous visits it was a pitch fest.

The event was all about leadership and coaching. Our coach for the day was G.A. Bartick. He’s been consulting with Google for the last 5 years. He was great! He kept us engaged for the day and memorized all our names (there were about 30 in the room). He would call on us throughout the day so we had to be on our toes. Because of this, most of the room was present for the talk (I.e. Not checking email/Instagram/texts every 2 minutes). It was a good strategy for sure to keep the room engaged. He told us his secret for memorizing our names. Here it is:

Step 1: Listen – Really hear the person when they give you their name. If you’re like me, you can forget within a nanosecond. So he said you really have to listen and be present.

Step 2: Name Association – Think of someone you know in your life who already has that name and link the two. Or make something up that’s funny. I tried it out later that day when I met a guy named Jesse. Since no Jesse’s came to mind, I thought of him as the legendary outlaw, Jesse James. Another example from the event was a lady named Tiffany. He pictured her with a ton of sparkly jewelry all around her.

Step 3: Repetition – Try and use their name a few times when you first meet them. Don’t overdo it, but do say it a few times. You can overdo it in your imagination. So with Jesse, over the course of a few hours, I repeated his name several times to myself. And now it’s stuck.

The role of a coach/manager IS to continuously improve the performance of the team. Something he suggested we do at the end of each day is ask ourselves if we improved our team.

More highlights from the day:

Catch people doing more things right and fewer things wrong.

Coach to the future, not to the past.

Managing expectations can be broken down into 3 key components:

Set

Monitor

Reinforce

The Skills Transfer Process – With this one, he gave an example of doing a sort of trick with transferring a pen cap to different hands. He showed Larry from the audience how to do it and then walked away. Larry wasn’t able to get it. It was clear that was the wrong way of managing this process. Then he went through the below process which was clearly the better way to manage.

Explain

Demonstrate

Practice with Coaching

Observe

Feedback

One on One’s – His organization advocates doing them monthly. I’ve been doing this quarterly for years with my staff but have been lax over the last 12 months. The monthly plan sounds like a lot of work, but it does feel like the right way to go. He gave us a short process we can follow:

Purpose of the meeting

Outline

Last month’s action items

Last month’s goals

Last month’s results

This month’s goals

This month’s action items

Input – As you explain what you’ll be going over for the meeting, you ask if there’s anything they’d like to discuss.

Transition – Is it okay if we start…

He also asked the person that we’re reviewing to take notes and send this to us after the meeting. This is good for many reasons such as a paper trail of the meetings and to make sure they’re listening and on the same page.

And lastly be the tortoise not the hare. Check out the video! Don’t rush things. Be present. Be yourself. I really liked the video and discovered it was created by Issimo.

Thanks for taking the time to read my recap. I hope you have a fantastic rest of the month!